Elon Musk uses unique two-hands test to hire SpaceX employees
Lucy Devine
Featured Image Credit: Chesnot/Getty Images/Getty Stock Image
Despite some of the biggest jobs in tech requiring college degrees, Elon Musk has always advocated for skills over education.
In fact, he once warned not to 'confuse schooling with education', explaining: "I didn't go to Harvard but the people that work for me did."
With Musk attracting top talent for the likes of Tesla and SpaceX, many wonder if he has some sort of strategy when it comes to hiring.
Well, turns out that businessman uses what he calls a 'two-hand' strategy - and it's brilliantly simple.
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The 'two hands' strategy is basically split into two parts:
It's no surprise that Musk would value experience over education. In fact, he's said in the past: "I think college is basically for fun and to prove that you can do your chores, but they're not for learning."
Therefore, the first step is assessing the candidate's experience rather than how many hours they've spent studying for a degree.
The approach focuses more on whether the candidate has the skills and knowledge to be competent in the role, rather than honing in too much on how many academic accolades they have.
The second part of the strategy is known as 'hands-on testing' and essentially refers to the interview process.
Interviewing candidates in the traditional way - and basically assessing their knowledge - might not be as effective as giving them a task that resembles the kind of responsibilities the person might have in the role.
Rather than relaying information in an interview, this helps hiring managers understand how the person would perform day-to-day.
It also allows the process to be a little more efficient, instead of repeating several interviews to test a candidate's knowledge.
Musk previously used a sneaky tactic to discover which one of his Tesla employees had been leaking information.
A leak of confidential information took place in 2008, five years after the company was first founded.
One curious X user asked Musk for more information about the leak in a post on X in 2022, when he tagged the founder and wrote: "Elon in 2008 how did you catch that employee who leaked the confidential data of Tesla and sold it to the news outlet?"
Musk replied to describe it as an 'interesting story', before revealing the method his team used to figure out who was responsible for sharing the information.
He explained: "We sent what appeared to be identical emails to all, but each was actually coded with either one or two spaces between sentences, forming a binary signature that identified the leaker."
By identifying the same signature in the information that had been leaked, Musk was able to track down the employee responsible.